Beat Poet Gregory Corso Dies at 70
Updated 6:41 PM ET January 18, 2001
By DOUG GLASS, Associated Press Writer
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Poet Gregory Corso, one of the circle of Beat poets
that included Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, has died. He was 70.
Corso, who had prostate cancer, died Wednesday, his daughter, Sheri
Langerman, said Thursday. He had been living with her since September,
she said.
Born in New York's Greenwich Village, Corso was the author or
co-author of more than 20 collections of poetry and other works.
Ginsberg discovered Corso in the 1950s. Corso's first poems were
published in 1955.
One of his best-known works was the 1958 poem "Bomb," an ode to atomic
weapons in the shape of a mushroom cloud. "Know that the earth will
madonna the Bomb/ that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be
born/ magisterial bombs wrapped in ermine," he wrote.
Among his collections of poems are "Gasoline," "Elegiac Feelings
American" and "Mindfield."
He remained active up until his death, recording a CD with Marianne
Faithfull at his daughter's home, Langerman said.
Corso was born March 26, 1930, to teen-age parents who separated a
year after his birth. His own biographical notes in a compilation
called "The New American Poetry" give a sample of his style and the
early hardship of his life:
"Born by young Italian parents, father 17 mother 16, born in New York
City Greenwich Village 190 Bleecker, mother year after me left
not-too-bright father and went back to Italy, thus I entered life of
orphanage and four foster parents and at 11 father remarried and took
me back but all was wrong because two years later I ran away and
caught sent away again and sent away to boys home for two years and
let out and went back home and ran away again and sent to Bellevue for
observation ..."
At age 17, Corso went to prison for three years on a theft charge.
After his release in 1950, he worked as a laborer in New York City, a
newspaper reporter in Los Angeles, and a sailor on a boat to Africa
and South America.
It was in New York City that he first met Ginsberg, who introduced him
to contemporary, experimental work.
Maria Damon, an English professor at the University of Minnesota who
has taught Beat literature, spent a week studying under Corso at the
Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., in 1977. While Corso was lesser
known than Ginsberg and Kerouac, he deserves no less recognition, she
said.
"I would say that he was very gifted, also undisciplined, which is
part of the beauty of Beat writing," she said. "He was very well-read
but not from formal schooling. He put things together in a highly
romanticized way."
Michael Skau, author of a 1999 book on Corso, said Corso was a media
favorite when the Beat movement exploded in the 1950s because he was
"the prototype of a bad boy."
"He was very disruptive whether it was a social setting or a literary
setting, very antagonistic even toward his closest friends," Skau
said. "Ginsberg tolerated behavior from Corso that made Ginsberg look
like a saint."
Corso was married three times. Survivors include five children, seven
grandchildren and one great-grandchild, Langerman said.
Funeral arrangements were not final, but a service was planned in
Greenwich Village, with burial in Rome, Langerman said.